Nigerian writer, teacher, and
administrator,
a forerunner of a whole
generation of African women writers. Flora Nwapa is best-known for
re-creating Igbo (Ibo) life and traditions from a woman's viewpoint.
With Efuru (1966) Nwapa
became black Africa's first internationally published female novelist
in the English language. She has been called the mother of modern
African literature

"When I do write about women in
Nigeria, in Africa, I try to paint a positive picture about women
because there are many women who are very, very positive in their
thinking, who are very, very independent, and very, very industrious." (from
an interview with Marie Umeh, 1995)

Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa was born in Oguta, eastern
Nigeria, which was then a British colony. Both of her parents,
Christopher Ijeoma and Martha Nwapa, were teachers. She was educated at
the University of Idaban, receiving her B.A. in 1957. Nwapa continued
her studies in England, earning in 1958 a degree in education from the
University of Edinburgh.

After returnig to Nigeria in 1959 Nwapa worked as an education
officer in Calabar for a short time, and then she taught geography and
English at Queen's School in Enugu. From 1962 to 1964 Nwapa was an
assistant registrar at the University of Lagos. During the Nigerian
Civil war, which broke out in 1967, she left Lagos with her family.
Like many members of the Igbo elite, they were forced to to return to
the eastern region after the end of the conflict. Nwapa served as
Minister for Health and Social Welfare for the East Central State
(1970-1971). Her tasks included finding homes for 2000 war orphans.
Later on she worked for Commissioner for Lands, Survey, and Urban
Development (1971-1974). In 1982 the Nigerian government bestowed on
her one of the country's highest honors, the OON (Order of Niger). By
her own town, Oguta, she was awarded the highest chieftaincy title, Ogbuefi,
which is usually reserved for men of achievement.

Besides writing books, Nwapa established Tana Press, which
published adult fiction. It was the first indigenous publishing house
owned by a black African woman in West Africa. Between 1979 and 1981
she produced eight volumes of adult fiction. Nwapa set up also another
publishing company, Flora Nwapa and Co., which specialized in
children's fiction. In these books she combined Nigerian elements with
general moral and ethical teachings. As a business woman, she also
encouraged with her own exaple to break the traditional female roles of
wife/mother and strive for equality in society. However, Nwapa did not
call herself a feminist but a "womanist," a term coined by the American
writer Alice Walker in her collection of essays, In Search of My
Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose (1983).

As a novelist Nwapa made her debut with Efuru, based
on an old folktale of a woman chosen by gods, but challenged the
traditional portrayal of women. Efuru, which Nwapa started to
write in 1962, was the first novel published by a Nigerian woman in
English. The Promised Land by the Kenyan Grace Ogot appeared
also in 1966; both works were pathbreakers. Nwapa sent to manuscript to
her good friend Chinua Achebe in Lagos and
after some editorial suggestions, Achebe sent it to Heineman
Educational Books for publication in the African Writers Series (No.
56). The story was set in a rural community. Efuru, the heroine, is a
strong and beautiful woman. She loses her child and has two unhappy
marriages, but struggless against all obstacles to become a successful
businesswoman. At the end she goes to the lake goddess, Uhamiri, who is
like a mirror of herself, but she can also be regarded as Nwapa's own
alter ego, her mother and daughter. Uhamiri gives her worshipers wealth
and beauty but few children. Locally the river goddess was known as
Ogbuide. At a conferense, "Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses and
Power" Nwapa revealed that she has thought of writing a sequel to Efuru,
to be titled Efuru in Her Glory.

Nwapa's second novel, Idu
(1970), was also a story about a woman, whose life is bound up with
that of her husband. When he dies, she choices to seek him out in the
land of dead rather than live without him or prefer motherhood to
anything else. The critical reception was mainly hostile. Eustace
Palmer in African Literature Today and Eldred Jones in The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature compared it with Elechi Amadi's The Concubine (1966),
also published in the African Writersn series (No. 25), but not in
Nwapa's favour. The war novel, Never
Again (1975), drew its material from the Nigerian Civil War (see also Chinua
Achebe's Beware, Soul Brother, 1971,
a collection of poems, and Elechi Amadi's Sunset in Biafra,
1979). The protagonist, Kate, who starts as a supporter of the
Biafran cause, ends struggling simply to survive. Wives at War, and Other Stories
(1980) dealt with the Biafran conflict.

Nwapa wrote short stories, poetry and children's books, such
as Mummywater (1979), which
brought to life a water deity - the water
goddess Ogbuide or Uhamiri appeared also in her adult fiction;
Mummywata was her westernized Igbo counterpart. A central theme in her
fiction was childlessness, from her early novels to Women Are Different (1986), in which her four major female characters choose between such
options as self actualization in their career and the marriage
institution, life in the town and in the country. "Her generation was
telling the men, that there are different ways of living one's life
fully and fruitfully," one of the women concludes. "They have a choice,
a choice to marry and have children, a choice to marry or divorce their
husband. Marriage is not THE only way." Noteworthy, spinsterhood
without children is not a positive option and Nwapa never had the
interest to deal with the theme of lesbianism.

Flora Nwapa died on October 16, 1993 in Enugu, Nigeria. Until
her death she was a visiting professor and lecturer at numerous
colleges in the U.S. and Nigeria. Nwapa was married to Chief Gogo
Nwakuche, a business man; they had three children. She remained
Nwakuche's first wife, although he took other wives. Because she wanted
her children to have a father, she did not leave or divorce him. At the
time of her death, Nwapa had completed The Lake Goddess, her final novel,
entrusting the manuscript to the Jamaican Chester Mills. This work
focused on the lake goddess Mammy Water, the eternal spring and
mythical inspirer of Nwapa's fiction. Legends tell that the fairy
godmother has her adobe on the bottom of Oguta Lake, near the author's
birthplace.